A Conservative Case for eSports

Why online games are a boon for conservative ideas, not just a childish fad.

The historian Jacques Barzun describes decadence as a time “full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance.” A civilization in decay cannot move forward because no one really knows where “forward” is.

In such a state, conservatives in particular are in danger of falling into the trap of dismissiveness. They tend to retreat from the fraying advance edge of society, seeking to preserve what remains of the past. There is, however, a different form of conservatism which, in decadence, might find opportunity. These conservatives wish to live nowhere but on the edge, as the custodians responsible for ferrying old and essential ideas across the murky waters of uncertainty.

This brings us to eSports, the playing of videogames competitively for money. In the wake of the recent shooting at a Jacksonville Madden tournament, eSports have seen an unprecedented level of exposure in the news, and some conservatives aren’t happy.

Most prominent among the eSports detractors is Tom Nichols — professor, author and gamer. Though Nichols has often regaled his Twitter followers with tales and screenshots of his Fallout exploits (he even owns the pip-boy peripheral!), eSports are where he draws the line:

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1034208003346448384

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1034280648628994050

Although many have called Tom a curmudgeon for his perspective, his points deserve to be addressed, especially his central concern with eSports as a promoted career path for young people. He believes that while playing videogames is a fine hobby, it absolutely should not be seen as a profession.

As a fan of eSports for several years and a conservative, I see the matter rather differently. In fact, eSports overlap with conservative principles in many ways, if only we are willing to look.

Which Conservatives Need Convincing?

Let us begin by narrowing down the group of conservatives to whom the case for eSports can and needs to be made. Then, we will focus on the various qualities competitive videogames offer to society by conservative standards, over and above even traditional professional sports.

We may dispense with hard Libertarians immediately. The people who truly just wish to be left alone and to leave others alone do not, outside of these principles, believe in prescribing morality to others. They therefore have no problem with the young but bustling eSports industry flourishing in a free market.

Adjacent to the hardcore Liberals are the evolutionary-psychologist/economist “intellectual dark web” folk, who believe biology and other sciences prescribe morality; that is, survival techniques we ought to follow. There is no use speaking to these people of the inherent qualities of eSports outside of the scientific mold. I therefore will not be addressing them, although they do seem to have a lot of respect for the importance of games to society, and thus may be on-board with eSports as well. Their main reservation may be that such hobbies or professions are distractions from the business of finding a mate; this is a false stereotype I will address later.

True reactionaries who wish to reverse the last 500 years of human history probably object to eSports (or are at least extremely suspicious of them) for obvious reasons. Nothing I say can make the modern actually ancient, though I hope the connection to at least some ancient ideas may incidentally arise from my points.

Which conservatives remain?

Those who believe in preserving the morality and fabric of society and contend that professional competitive gaming is contrary to this pursuit, even more than modernity per se. These are the same social conservatives who often yearn for something like the ’50s, a modern liberalism free of social or moral corruption. I aim to explain how eSports are not part of the corruption, but may even be a stepping stone to its cure.

A Bustling Industry

The first thing a conservative should learn about eSports is that it qualifies as an example of Chesterton’s Fence. We are not speaking of an industry of phenomenon in its utter infancy, but rather a rapidly-growing reality that athwart-standers would need to actively destroy. The pro-gamer industry is not just a big thing, but a good thing, and Tom Nichols would agree with me if I could get him to sit down and watch TI.

The Madden tragedy (and Tom’s tweets) have arrived just a few days The International, a massive yearly Dota 2 tournament that just ended in Vancouver. If the reader thinks eSports are small local competitions of kids living in their mothers’ basements, some of the following numbers may come as a shock:

The grand final of this two-week tournament took place in an arena before a live audience of approximately 20,000 men, women, and children. It was broadcast on various online streaming services, with a combined peak viewership of 1.2 million, not counting Chinese statistics.[i] The prize for the five-man team who took first place? A cool $11,234,158.

Most of that money (part of a $25.5 million total prize pool) was not the result of corporate involvement or advertising. Valve, the company that owns the Dota 2 game and runs The International, contributed only $1.6 million to the pool, and the tournament had no broadcast advertising at all.

Instead, the majority of the prize pool was raised from the game’s massive community in return for in-game cosmetics and the tournament compendium, which lets you make predictions, a bracket and more for the opportunity of acquiring even more in-game cosmetics and goodies.[ii]

This democratic model incentivized Valve to create a great event for their customers, and is resistant to broader corporate influences that have corrupted the souls of other pro sports.

Speaking of money, it is hard to see how conservatives could oppose burgeoning industries full of small businesses. Valve Corp. may be a juggernaut, but many other tournament organizers, streaming collectives, logistics orgs, vendors, artists, venues and eSports teams are not. The reality is, eSports will continue to move money and create jobs as it grows.

It also cannot be denied that money is a large part of the American dream of social mobility and success. Consider, for example, Syed Sumail Hassan, who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan as a boy who had already been obsessed with Dota for years. At the age of 15, he was signed by Evil Geniuses, one of the well-established American eSports organizations. He had already bought his parents a house since dropping out of high school to play Dota full-time, and his career success shows no signs of slowing. At the time of this writing, he is 19, and playing video games in America has earned him over $3 million in prize money alone.[iii]

This is not to say, by the way, that eSports are a uniquely American phenomenon. The team that won TI this year included the first French and Australian players to ever win the title. They played against a Chinese team. A Russian team was considered by many the favorites to win. Japan is famous for its fighting game aficionados. Any League of Legends fan will tell you that Korea utterly dominates that sport, just as they dominate StarCraft. In 2013, the International champions were five Swedes. If eSports show America in decline, it is impossible to find a power on the world stage not in decline.

eSports have roughly the same economic potential as other international professional sports. Professional gaming is an established and growing industry. But is it good for us?

A Conservative Case for Sports

eSports make a lot of people money, and a lot more people happy, but then, so does the drug trade. What do pro sports in general bring to society such that we should support their continued existence? Even without getting into evolutionary theory or psychological ramblings about man’s need for war even in a peaceful society — quite a bit.

The first thing is that international sports open up international cultural exchange, the opportunity for very different people to meet each other outside of the usual contexts. Although two men may be enemies at cross-purposes in reality, in games they have the ability to meet peacefully and even to cooperate from a young age.

Professional sports provide extra-political spaces, activities and communities to players and fans, a quality that is deeply conservative in our age of everything-is-politics-and-politics-is-everything. They do it in a way that few other activities can manage, due to the money involved and the passion for competition and storytelling that keep fans involved.

Sports are also arbitrary, one of their greatest qualities. A fan of a sport is interested in it not because it honors him, pays him or brings him any particular reward. He is interested in the sport because it appeals to his soul, in a sense to his whims, and this itself carves out a niche for spectator sports in the human experience.

The hockey fan’s interests, his personal desire to watch this sport and root for the Maple Leafs, brings him into alignment with people he has never met, people who would ostensibly belong to the outgroup. The ability to leave behind Republican or Democrat, American or Russian, white or black, and to decide to care more about the rules of a contrived game is a deep expression of human freedom that is not to be trifled with. In the light of the game, we are one. The human will, our ability to arbitrarily choose, triumphs over the accidents of birth.

Moreover, a pro-sports tournament worth paying money to see is, in fact, a labor of love. It is an expression of human industry in the deepest sense of the term. Large groups of people have the opportunity to create something with and for each other, something excellent and pleasant, with no direct connection to the “proper business of mankind” as understood by “practical” men.

Pro sports therefore lie at the intersection of business and art, and may be closer to the latter than the former. Nichols compares eSports to bullfighting, which is silly, but for the same price I could point out “The Sun Also Rises” and ask him what Hemingway was contributing to civilization, exactly?[iv] The answer is perhaps that he was a great writer creating art for its own sake. If that is the case, could not a great athlete or a great organization or a great league create sport for its own sake?

Sports, like art, have a certain advantage over even religion as meaningful pursuits for the masses. Religions, if they truly exist at all, dictate the form of their own meaning. If one is to adhere to Christianity or Sikhism, there is a certain way in which one must approach the Creator, holy men, etc.

Baseball, conversely, with that wonderful leeway redolent of enlightenment liberalism and free market capitalism, can mean whatever we want it to mean. We may choose to focus on the Orioles’ rebuilding year, or the struggles of an individual player, or an individual manager, or a different team entirely.

Reading “The Brothers Karamazov” could yield an exploration in moral philosophy, contemplation of an intricate murder mystery, an adoration for Alyosha or an admiration for the aesthetics of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Sports rely not only on the flexibility of choosing meaning but on the arbitrary rigidity of the rules of the game. Though the story we tell about baseball is up to us, what baseball is and who won last night’s game are (almost) never in question. If someone were to ask us why these are the rules rather than some others, our response should be — they are what they are, and that’s what the game is.

These universally-agreed-upon constraints reflect the arbitrary constraints on every human life (these are my parents, these are my talents, this is my skin color). The choice of what the constraints mean reflects our ability to overcome or reframe those constraints. It is this combination of freedom and limitation that lends sports and art their depth and makes them into canvasses upon which the human experience may be painted in microcosm.

This combination of structure and freedom, of set rules in which one may choose one’s meaning, is also deeply reflective of enlightened humanism, the collection of moral aspirations that (were initially meant to) undergird liberal democracy. Sports, far from reflecting the decline of the West, may be the only part of it still truly alive. What other non-fraught non-compulsory space for collectively hearing and telling meaningful human stories still exist? Certainly none as popular or dynamic as competitive sport.

Make no mistake, it is exactly this complex blend that the enlightenment conservative should love. The reactionary does not believe the average man (ultimately) has the capacity to find his own meaning; the progressive does not (ultimately) believe in any hard and fixed rules that should limit that pursuit.

A fixed structure around which man may choose to build meaning is a happy medium that would probably not sound so foreign to, say, Edmund Burke.

All of this true of eSports. And whereas virtual competition still captures the imagination and serves as a chosen ground for communal meaning, it does so without some of the negative consequences of its real-life counterparts.

eSports — Organic and Democratic

Much of Nichols’ concern about eSports revolves around eSports as a career, for reasons obvious to many conservatives and responsible adults of all persuasions.

Pro sports have had a negative effect as the object of many a young person’s imagination. Too many have worked toward a career in pro sports unsuccessfully, only to be left with no skills and no prospects of starting a career in a different field. They often become resentful, as if they deserved an incredibly rare job as a professional athlete, and seek compensation from society.

Pro sports are seen as a ticket to the good life, and for some they are, but these are obviously a tiny minority, the lottery winners. And just like the lottery, there are companies (often entangled with governments) ready to exploit the dreams of the less-fortunate for their own gain with no thought for the damage they cause to lives and communities. eSports, at least so far, have been surprisingly different.

The first major difference lies in the nature of amateur eSport competition. The second lies in the way the industry and its games have developed.

When a teenager plays basketball and dreams of competing in the NBA, he does so based on confidence born of success. He plays on school teams or with friends, measures his accomplishments and dreams of being the next Michael Jordan or LeBron James. He will eventually move up in difficulty as he ages, playing harder and harder teams drawn from a larger and larger player pool, hoping to be noticed by a talent scout.

When a young teen plays Dota 2, he plays against other players from his continent[v] selected by an algorithm to be at about his level of skill. He measures his success by match-making rank or ELO, and dreams of becoming the next Sumail.

Of course, Sumail’s matchmaking rank is near first in the online scoreboards, whereas the average player can barely break out of the lowest levels of Dota’s tiered ranking system. Every time a player loses, their rank decreases. Every time they win, they are matched up with more challenging opponents the next game. They have to do a lot of winning before they ever have a change of running into a pro player.

It is, you see, much harder to convince oneself that a Dota career is viable than it is to do the same in basketball. The players who are even good enough to consider trying pro-gaming are objectively in the 99th percentile of a self-selecting group. Once they reach that level, they are indeed matched for games against pro players.

Sumail was already playing against North American professional players long before he was ever offered a contract. He was not fooling himself into thinking he could beat pro players — he had done it already. Sumail and the beginner American player are essentially part of the same gaming community, the same matchmaking pool.

It is like you go to the court for a pickup game, and at least in theory, you could be playing against LeBron James. There is no room here for misplaced self-confidence. The numbers don’t lie, and the numbers will quickly tell a casual Dota hobbyist whether they’re even close to being within reach of a gaming career.

It must be reemphasized that this is a self-selecting gaming community. eSports are not games, in the vast majority of cases, that are foisted on young players by a pressuring community, school requirements or immense advertising blitzes.

To the contrary, every game that has become an eSport was originally a product for fun, casual play and only became a sport when the game became popular enough and the competition sufficiently fierce. Like the world-conquering Fortnite, games spread mostly by word of mouth. The player base for the eSport is drawn from the preexisting casual players of the same, all of whom play on the same “field” as all other players.

There is therefore no need to create a farm system with scouts going to schools, who are in turn motivated to have the students play the sport for money or reputation. Online gaming is not college football. There is no feeder racket working on convincing kids they should at least try to make something more of their casual game.

There will always be players deluded as to their own abilities who make truly irresponsible choices. But in eSports, they will naturally be a tiny minority ignoring all the truth their stats and rankings tell them. Their mistakes should not be blamed on the sport, but on them.

eSports largely avoid the exploitation of dreams present in many pro sports. In eSports there are no real gatekeepers preventing you from playing the exact same game as the professionals, but there is also no coercion or manipulation forcing anyone to play more than they wish. Players become only as interested, obsessed or deluded as they (and possibly their parents) wish them to be.

Other Objections

Sports are inherently a worthy pursuit, and their greatest negative consequences are negated in the democratic, non-coercive environment of eSports. There will, however, still be objections to this assessment, some of which I will run through at the length they deserve.

eSports are not or cannot be the foundations of actual communities. False. Come to a tournament, hang out on a game’s Reddit board or spectate a match on Twitch.[vi] You may be surprised what you see and feel.

eSports are for incel men. A stereotype that couldn’t be further from the truth. Plenty of women are into eSports, many of them are rabid fans and passionate community members and many of them are players. There are also many male pro players who are married with kids.

Despite some unfortunate foul language even at pro tournaments (a facet of gamer culture that will hopefully disappear from the professional level as eSports grows up), eSports is surprisingly wholesome. TI had moving and much-lauded video tributes to Sheever, a female tournament host who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and the nascent all-female Dota community in Brazil. Friendship, fun and the triumph of the human spirit, with less illegal behavior than the White House, Congress or the NFL.

We all would have laughed at this 20 years ago. Perhaps we did not have enough imagination 20 years ago.

Only teenagers are interested in this. People of all ages are actually interested in this.

eSports substitutes virtual life for real life. eSports are a part of real life.

eSports are a substitute for the real thing. Direct me to the “real-life” version of Dota or StarCraft and I’ll be all over it.

Multiplayer games have toxic communities. Sometimes. Sometimes, their communities are lovely.

Conclusion

eSports, like sports in general, give real benefits to fans and players that far outweigh the dangers of corruption of the youth. They constitute a new canvas on which to write stories, compete, and participate in community.

They have less of a problem of promoting false career dreams to youngsters than traditional sports, and will be that way for the foreseeable future due to constant feedback on rank and the exposure of casual players to professionals.

In our time of broader civilizational decay, not every new development is negative. With an open mind, even conservative principles can find new ways to move forward.

eSports are good for us. The kids are alright.

[i] Chinese Statistics are traditionally considered unreliable and inflated by thousands of bots. Including Chinese viewers (there was a Chinese team in the grand final) peak viewership was 15 million.

[ii] The game itself, without extra cosmetics, is free.

[iii] Many pro eSports players also make money from sponsorship, salary, and/or streaming their play on tournament downtime.

[iv] Hemingway was also in some sense a decline from “real writing” and a bad influence on the youth, very few of whom could ever become a Hemingway and who would have been shirking responsibility by traveling to Spain to smoke cigarettes.

[v] Dota matchmaking pools are sorted by region, e.g. Europe, North America, India.

[vi] Twitch.tv is the most successful game broadcasting company in the West. Twitch chat — the chat room accompanying live streams of games — is hard to describe properly. Sometimes shocking but often wonderful, it is a cross between public art, the borg, and a stadium crowd. It is also a heck of a lot of fun, especially as the spectator numbers climb into the hundreds of thousands.